EP 53 / Less Heroics, More Flywheel with Suzanne Smith

Most nonprofit leaders I know can't take a real vacation. They take their laptop to the beach, check email between activities, and answer "just one quick question" from the team every day they're gone. It's so common that it starts to feel normal.

Suzanne Smith sees it differently. After more than 30 years in the nonprofit sector, she uses that exact situation as her clearest test of whether an organization is fragile. If the organization can't run for a week without its leader, it's running on heroics, and heroics isn't something you can sustain.

In Episode 53 of Nonprofit Nook, Suzanne and I talk about her new book, The Nonprofit Flywheel, the six drivers that build momentum in a nonprofit, and what leaders of small organizations can do to start building that momentum this week. Listen to the full episode below, read the show notes, or scroll down for the complete transcript.

SHOW NOTES

What happens to your nonprofit when you take a week off? If your phone never stops buzzing, Suzanne Smith would say your organization is trying to tell you something.

Suzanne is the founder and CEO of Social Impact Architects, and she has spent more than 30 years in the nonprofit sector as a founder, an executive, and a strategist. She knows burnout from the inside. When she led the Childhood Obesity Movement for the American Heart Association, she remembers being exhausted, and she remembers the exhaustion in her team's eyes even more clearly.

That experience shaped how she sees burnout today. Burnout is a leadership and systems issue as much as a personal one. The leader sets the temperature for the whole organization, and the research backs her up: people burn out less when they feel like they're part of a team.

After 15 years working in nonprofits, Suzanne earned her MBA at Duke and spent the next 15 years translating proven business frameworks into tools that fit how nonprofits actually work. One of those is Jim Collins' flywheel effect from Good to Great. Her team spent the better part of five years researching it in the nonprofit world, and the result is her new book, The Nonprofit Flywheel, written as a playbook you can pick up, use, and share with your team. The digital edition is free.

In this episode of Nonprofit Nook, Suzanne joins Wendy to walk through the six drivers of the nonprofit flywheel: impact (the steak), brand (the sizzle), revenue, operations, and the culture and governance that sit at the center. She also shares the three signs she looks for when an organization is fragile, and why heroics is not a business model.

Then she gets practical. For leaders of small nonprofits who carry most of the work themselves, she explains where to start, how a strategic plan helps you decide where to spend your time, and what to do differently on Monday morning.

Underneath it all, this is a conversation about building an organization that keeps moving when one person steps away, including you.

If you lead, volunteer with, support, or dream of starting a nonprofit, this conversation is a reminder that strong organizations run on clear roles, shared direction, and steady momentum. Less heroics, more flywheel.

In This Episode

You'll hear Wendy and Suzanne talk about:

• What leading the Childhood Obesity Movement for the American Heart Association taught Suzanne about burnout

• Why burnout is a leadership and systems issue, and why people who feel part of a team burn out less

• The three signs of a fragile nonprofit: a CEO who can't take a vacation, a rubber-stamp board, and high turnover

• What the flywheel effect is and how Suzanne adapted Jim Collins' framework for nonprofits

• How impact, brand, revenue, operations, culture, and governance feed each other

• Why operations may be the most underrepresented driver, and why the people behind the scenes are the unsung heroes

• Where to start when you're carrying most of the work yourself, including two quick wins and a few long-term goals

• What to do differently on Monday morning so your team stops running on heroics

Connect with Suzanne Smith

Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn, Instagram, Social Impact Architects and MeetSuzanne.com.

• Social TrendSpotter: Suzanne's weekly newsletter on the future of the social sector.

• The Nonprofit Flywheel: A Playbook for Sustainable Growth, Smarter Strategy, and Lasting Impact launched October 1, 2026, with a free digital edition, companion tools and resources, and print editions on Amazon.

Connect with Wendy + Nonprofit Nook

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https://nonprofitnook.com

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Wendy Kidd on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendykidd/

More from Boss Level Engaged

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https://www.bosslevelengaged.com/bosstable

TRANSCRIPT

Suzanne: I look at financials, I look at culture scores, I look at all those things. But to me, the thing that always tells me whether an organization is fragile or not is whether the CEO can go on vacation. If he or she feels like they can't go on vacation, or, to go a level deeper, when they do go on vacation, people are pinging them left and right, that means the organization is relying on that individual.

Wendy: Hey everyone, welcome back to Nonprofit Nook. My guest today is Suzanne Smith, founder and CEO of Social Impact Architects. Suzanne has spent more than 30 years helping nonprofits turn big missions into lasting results as a founder, a former nonprofit executive, and a longtime strategist. She's an award-winning social entrepreneur and educator who has worked with thousands of nonprofit leaders on strategy, governance, leadership, and revenue. She also writes the Social TrendSpotter newsletter, which I am an avid fan of, and she's the author of The Nonprofit Flywheel, which brings together the frameworks and lessons she's refined over decades of work. Suzanne believes everyone is a changemaker, and I can't wait for you to hear from her. Welcome, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Thank you so much. I have been looking forward to this conversation. Our first conversation was offline, for everybody to know, and we said we should have recorded it because it was such a great conversation. So I hope this is part two.

Wendy: Exactly. And that was after I was lucky enough to pre-read the book, so I said, yes, you have to come on. We have to talk about the book, because I'm in love with it. I'm such an avid reader anyway, but this was right on point for me.

Suzanne: Well, you were one of 41 readers who actually read it and took it from what I would consider, as a professor, a B-plus, A-minus. That's where I would have graded it. And now it's an A-plus.

Wendy: Yay! I love it. I can't wait to get my real copy of the book. Do you have a copy you can show our listeners? Because I do put this on YouTube.

Suzanne: I do. I just got this in the mail two days ago.

Wendy: It's so pretty. I love purple, too.

Suzanne: And this is why it took me three years to write the book. I didn't want to write a book that no one would read. I wanted to write something that brought these ideas to life, which is why we call it a playbook.

Wendy: I love the whole theory and structure behind it. So let's dig in a little bit. You've said that in 30 years of this work, you lived the burnout yourself. Take me back to a time when you were the one holding it all together. What did it teach you about how nonprofits get built? I know you talk about that in the book.

Suzanne: Because I have a lot of lived experience in the nonprofit space, I think I bring that lived experience into this work. I've worked at local and national nonprofits. And what I'm talking about when I talk about burnout isn't the time early in my career when I stayed up late writing a grant and submitting it. It was the times when that was happening consistently over time. The example I always think back to was when I was lucky enough to lead the Childhood Obesity Movement for the American Heart Association. I remember just being exhausted. And probably more importantly, I remember the exhaustion in the eyes of my team.

That's one of the reasons I talk about burnout more at an organizational level and a systems level. Certainly we need to think about it at an individual level, and there's a lot of good work that has been done around secondary trauma and self-care at an individual level. But it's also a leadership practice, with the leader setting the temperature in the organization. So I spend a lot of time now talking to CEOs, just like I was talking to myself back then: What practices am I doing that are causing more burnout? And what could I be doing to reduce burnout in my team? That's been something I've been fascinated by over the last 15 years.

Wendy: I think that's such an important topic, because we often think about it as individuals, but we don't necessarily think about how we as leaders can help with that for our team. And I think that's a sign of a good boss, when they actually care about those things.

Suzanne: It is. And I love that you used the word team, because the research actually suggests that burnout is less when people feel like they're part of a larger team. The activities they're doing could be identical, but if they feel like they're part of a team, and there's somebody who can hold space for them, whether it's venting or diving in if they need support, they don't feel burnout in the same way. So that leadership part is something we talk quite a bit about in the book. But there's also building systems for people to take vacations, to have redundancy in the organization, to have standard operating procedures, so you're not relying on heroics. Heroics is not a business model, and it shouldn't be a business model we follow in the nonprofit space.

Wendy: That's such a good way of putting it, because that is what we tend to do in the nonprofit space. When we start our nonprofits, we're a small grassroots effort, and we're the heroes, but that's not sustainable. I know you call this book your love letter, and this is part of why you wrote it. But why this particular book, and why now?

Suzanne: It's been 30 years in this space, so I'm celebrating my 30th anniversary, and that was significant. I also waited a really long time to write this book because I felt like the sector had a lot of books. There are lots of books on nonprofit management and nonprofit leadership, and like many of your listeners, I also read the for-profit books. I really didn't want to write another book that sat on somebody's shelf. So I did a ton of research, no surprise to anybody who knows me, about what books actually get read. That's why we didn't write a book. We wrote a playbook.

A playbook, to me, means you dive in. It doesn't have to be sequential. We have an online repository where all of the templates and tools are available to anybody. We also made it free. It's a free digital download, so anybody can get access to it. We just had someone download it from Hong Kong. I wanted a book people would actually read and use.

The second thing was that I wanted a book that didn't just talk about theory. Theories are one thing, and you hear people bounce words around all the time, like sustainability or impact or innovation, but we don't ever really define them. So there are a lot of checklists and a lot of definitions in here, so we can demystify those things, not just for seasoned executives, but for people on the front lines and for board members. I wanted something people wouldn't just put on the shelf, but would use regularly to work with their teams.

Wendy: I love that you included the definitions, because not everybody's on the same page about how we use our words. You talked about how you can't build resilient communities on top of fragile nonprofit organizations, but we don't all agree on what fragile means. So what does fragile look like in real life inside a small nonprofit?

Suzanne: I'm glad you asked, because this has really been where my research has been for the last 15 years. I worked in the nonprofit space for 15 years, then went back to school, got my MBA at Duke, and knew this was something I wanted to do. One of the things that struck me then was that there were so many business practices we should apply to the nonprofit space. But at that time, we were transplanting them into nonprofits as if we could use them exactly the way the retail industry or health care does. Nonprofits are very different in the way we operate. We're our own industry. So what I've done the last 15 years is translate them properly into the nonprofit space and give them meaning within the context in which we work. I've applied them, and we've done the research around them. We've spent the better part of five years researching the flywheel effect and sustainability, and we can show that if you follow this model, it leads to growth across a whole lot of indicators, not just revenue.

To me, fragility speaks to a couple of things. I often joke that as a consultant, I'm half mechanic and half therapist. I get to look underneath the hood of an organization, and in the book we give you all the templates I use to do that. It's all the quantitative metrics. I look at financials, I look at culture scores, I look at all those things. But the thing that always tells me whether an organization is fragile is whether the CEO can go on vacation. If he or she feels like they can't, or, to go a level deeper, when they do go on vacation, people are pinging them left and right, that means the organization is relying on that individual.

The second thing I look at is the board. If I go to a board meeting and it's a rubber-stamp board, that's a fragile nonprofit. They're not using their board as ambassadors into the community, so they're putting all the work on the shoulders of staff and not creating that multiplier effect with the board.

And the final thing I look at is turnover. We actually have a higher rate of turnover in the nonprofit space than really any other industry. That's also a telltale sign that the organization is fragile and struggling with consistency in its business model.

Wendy: I completely agree on those three points, and I see them all the time. I hope people take that to heart and think, OK, what can I do to prevent that? One of the words you keep using, and it's obviously in the title of the book, is flywheel. For anybody who doesn't know what that means, what is it? And what are the six drivers of a flywheel?

Suzanne: I'm so pleased I get the opportunity to use this in the nonprofit space. Going back to what I said, there are all these great business techniques and frameworks that we just haven't properly applied to nonprofits. Jim Collins wrote a book called Good to Great, and in it he talks about the flywheel effect. It's basically a physics principle around the idea of a wheel. Imagine when you were a kid riding your bicycle, and at some point you realized you didn't have to pedal so fast. You could take your feet off the pedals and the wheel would keep moving forward. That's the flywheel effect. He proved it in the for-profit space and has a specific framework. I've always loved it and wanted for many years to apply it to the nonprofit space. Over the past 15 years, we've refined it and looked at which individual elements matter specifically for nonprofits to get that flywheel effect. Essentially, it's how you create momentum, and the opposite, where you get friction in your flywheel.

Wendy: When was the last time you set aside real time to work on your business or nonprofit instead of in it? The Boss Table gives you that time. It's my online membership for business owners and nonprofit leaders, and it includes a monthly Boss Day: four hours of protected, focused time to finally get to the work that moves your organization forward. You'll also have me as your fractional strategic partner. Bring an idea you want to test, a decision you're weighing, or a plan you want live feedback on, and we'll work through it together. You'll have a community of peers to ask for help, share ideas, and learn from. For-profit and nonprofit leaders sit at the same table on purpose because they have so much to learn from each other. The first 25 members get a founding rate of $125 a month. Join us at bosslevelengaged.com/bosstable. I'd love to see you at the table.

Wendy: So what are the six pieces you talk about in your book, and how do they feed each other?

Suzanne: If you think about a wheel, the first part is impact. Impact is our bottom line. It's the product and service we're giving to the community, so it's the thing we really need to pay attention to. As a Texan, I call that the steak, and you want to deliver grade A steak to the community. That's why it's important for us to measure the work we're doing and communicate the impact we're having. First and foremost, that's what we've got to focus on.

Second is brand. I'm very intentional about using the word brand instead of marketing and communications, because brand to me is the sizzle. What's the thing that elevates the steak? Imagine you're at Chili's and you see the fajitas go by and you hear that sizzle. You want that sizzle, because then people start paying attention. With all the noise out there, we need to make sure our messages are resonating with the community. And brand isn't just your marketing and communications. It's your front lines and what people experience when they come to see you. What does your website look like? Is it working? Can people get to where they need to go?

What Jim Collins shows on the for-profit side, and what I've shown on the nonprofit side, is that if you focus on impact and brand, revenue will take care of itself. People will pay attention to you, whether it's a funder or a donor. They'll find you, and they'll give you money to plow back into impact and make it even stronger.

The fourth part is operations, which I think is probably the most underrepresented driver. Our nonprofits are often held together by duct tape and determination.

Wendy: It's so true.

Suzanne: We don't spend the time we should on our HR practices, our IT practices, or our financial management. So the book has a healthy dose of those things, including practices related to AI. And the people behind the scenes in operations are, to me, the unsung heroes of nonprofits. They're holding things together so the people on the front lines can do their work seamlessly. That's the outer part of the flywheel: impact, brand, revenue, and operations. If you do those four things right, you get additional revenue and you can multiply your impact.

Nestled in between are culture and governance. There's a reason people say culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is such an important part, and even more so in the last decade. Nonprofits have to bring people in because of their mission, but they need to make sure those people stay, and they stay because of the culture. And of course, governance. Governance is a function of your board, but it's also a function of how accountable you are to the community, so everybody in the organization should be practicing good governance. Those six things are what we've shown actually create the flywheel effect, and they're the six drivers we talk about in the book.

Wendy: I love that you divided it out that way, because it helps people understand the importance of each one, not just one. I often find people focus on one, two, or three, but not all six. They don't understand how they interweave and, like you said, feed on each other. Most of my listeners are running really small organizations and carrying most of it themselves. Where would you suggest they start instead of trying to tackle all of this at once? Because it is a lot.

Suzanne: It is a lot. That's one of the things we talk about in the book, and I have to applaud the pre-readers, because they helped me think about wayfinding in this book. We have a framework that basically asks: Which question is keeping you up at night? Is it about impact? Brand? Operations? Where do you feel most vulnerable? That's where we encourage people to focus their efforts in the short term.

In the long term, we also have a chapter on strategic planning. I think every organization, and every person, should have a strategic plan. The most important thing you can do is decide where to spend your time, and where you spend your time in an organization is a function of your strategic plan. Even if you do a DIY action plan, and we give you all the ways you can do that, having structure around where you want to focus your energy is good for you as an individual. It makes sure you're focused on the right things and connected to what will matter most, and it creates that momentum in the flywheel. It also gets your team on board and makes sure everybody is moving in the same direction. Just like any great team, if everybody's aiming in the same direction and knows what role they play, you'll naturally get the flywheel effect, instead of a scattershot approach or silos that cause friction.

Wendy: I think some people are intimidated by strategic planning and aren't quite sure what it means for them. I love that you've connected it to the day-to-day, because that's what it's really about. The strategic plan controls the direction your ship is going. You're going to have momentum, but if everybody's not rowing in the same direction, you won't get there. You have to know where you're headed and make sure the whole team is bought in.

Suzanne: And hopefully that strategic plan is metered out so you can pace yourself. At the end of the book, I basically say choose two things that are quick wins. Maybe you do a staff retreat or a board retreat. Maybe you decide you don't have values, so you're going to create them over the next two months. Those are quick wins you can accomplish, and they'll start creating momentum. Then choose some long-term things. For example, we want to have an audit in the next couple of years, so let's figure out how to make that happen. Or maybe you look at opportunities for greater collaboration and make a list of groups you could work with. Or maybe you decide you want to move into a different geography. Those won't happen quickly, but they're aspirational goals you should be setting over time. That's all a strategic plan is: the ability to say yes or no to certain things and focus your energy.

Wendy: Absolutely. I have loved our conversation, and I have one more question for you. I'm going to quote you from your book. You wrote, "We cannot keep asking exhausted people for even more heroics." I love that line. If a leader believes that, what should she do differently on Monday morning?

Suzanne: One of my favorite taglines from the book is "less heroics, more flywheel." We even borrow the Saturday Night Live "more cowbell" bit as an iconic way to think about it. Here are a couple of things. And by the way, that leader could also be the board chair, because they're leading their own group of people.

Wendy: Yes, it is.

Suzanne: So on Monday morning, I'd encourage that person to sit down, take a look at the book, and choose those two things they can focus on. I'd also talk to your leadership team and ask, "Where do you think we're getting drag in the organization?" Then guide them toward choosing one or two things they could work on, like making expense reports easier, making internal communications flow better, or making sure they're tagging board members on social media. It can be simple things that make a big difference.

Choose some small things and some large things. As a management team, choose things at a strategic level that require your collective energy, and then choose some things individual people can focus on. Then the leader needs to hold them accountable. Say, "At our update in two weeks, come back to me with an action plan. What will this look like? How will we accomplish it? Look at best practices and a couple of deep dives." I think there are a lot of CEOs out there who animate the entire organization instead of allowing the organization to animate itself.

Going back to whether the leader can go on vacation: to me, the true test of a leader is whether you can go on vacation for a full week and never be contacted. Everybody knows their role in the engine, you've done everything you can beforehand to prepare people, and you're able to really relax. That's what you need to be doing every week, making sure you're not unintentionally propping up all the other parts of the organization through your heroics, and modeling that for your management team and frontline staff.

Wendy: It's so true, and it's true for for-profit businesses, too. It's an easy test. Thank you so much for coming on today. I do want you to tell everybody how they can get your book, because that's important to me.

Suzanne: As I said, I really wanted everybody to have access to this. It's a free digital download on our website, meetsuzanne.com, and we encourage you to start there. You'll probably be like me and want the physical book once you've downloaded it, and it's available on Amazon as well. During October, we have a special promotion where you can get a signed nameplate and a bunch of goodies, like some of the stickers we made to promote the idea of the flywheel and have a little fun. So go to the website and download it, and if you're getting use out of it, get the book on Amazon. We also have book club and book conversation guides. I have a number of nonprofits working through it with their entire management team, and nonprofit management programs that will be using it in their classes.

Wendy: That's great. I think it would be a great read for boards, too.

Suzanne: One of my favorite quotes was, "Every nonprofit executive director needs to read this once. Every board member needs to read it twice." Our business model is different, and board members need to understand the language and the frameworks and how they can plug in to be the best board member.

Wendy: Absolutely. That's how they become part of the team, and it's all a team effort.

Suzanne: That's right. Absolutely.

Wendy: Thank you so much again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Everybody, go read her book. I promise you it's fantastic, and I guarantee there's a chapter that will speak to you, because there were many that spoke to me. Thanks again, Suzanne, and we'll see everybody next week.

Suzanne: Thank you. I really appreciate being on this, and I'd love to hear from people who have questions about the book. Reach out to me if you have specific questions.

Wendy: Absolutely. Bye, everybody.